Flat Objects

I've been unable to find an answer to this on my own... What's the strategy for creating a flat object? Like sheet-of-paper flat?

It seems the editing tools allow you to make your basic cube very thin, but not flat... The sides are still there, and still have to be dealt with.

If there's no way to make them a 0 (zero) thickness, then what's Plan B? It seems that you can't make those undesired surfaces 100% transparent, either, so the color is still showing.

Logic suggests applying to the undesired surfaces a texture that is fully transparent and dealing with it that way. But surely there's an accepted convention I'm just not aware of yet.

Any pointers muchly appreciated.

Hi Wes - Try this for very thin stuff.

1. Create a sphere.
   
2. Set its end-dimple to 99%.
   
3. Now change it into a box.
   
4. Say "Wow!"
   
5. Hold the Ctrl-key to resize it. Notice that even though it looks reeeeeeally thin now, it's bounding box is still as big as it was.
   
6. Rezise it down along its thin axis. All the way down to 0.010m.
   
7. Say "Wow!" again. Add "Awesome" for emphasis. Welcome to introductory prim-torturing
   

As far as transparancy is concerned - yeah, you can only go as far as 90% with the build tools. This is to prevent you from accidentally losing your entire object before you learn about things like "highlight transparant".

But script can get all the way to 100%. As a basic example:

default
{
	state_entry()
	{
		llSetAlpha(0.0, ALL_SIDES);
		llRemoveInventory( llGetScriptName() );
	}
}

dropped into a prim will set it to completely transparant, after which you can use "select texture" to bring back just the faces you want visible.

you're logic is correct ...

But you texture 5 sides of the cube with a 100% alpha texture.
It's not perfect but gets rid of the visible sides.

If you use a fully alpha'd texture instead of the "transparency" control it looks better.

( I didn't notice ben's script will do the same thing above. I personally prefer to use a texture )

Dimple.

What you do is, make a sphere. set it to 0.49 and 0.50 dimple. turn it into a cube. squish flat.

Thanks, everyone; this was very helpful.

The script approach will be tried, but probably has to wait. While I'm a programmer by day, I've not even stuck a toe in the water with it here just yet... Crawl / walk / run, etc., etc. For now, still just trying to master prims!

I use transparent texture but recently I've started also setting Alpha low as well, otherwise it shows up as a solid loading texture when things are slow...

It's a minor esthetic point, I guess, but I like trying to make my build as nice as possible even when SL is having a bad day.